Huffman: Digg failed by neglecting its community and chasing Twitter
Steve Huffman · #400 Reddit Founder: “I Wish I Still Owned Reddit Now” – with Steve Huffman · Oct 20, 2010 · at 3:02
Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman reflects on the competitive downfall of social news rival Digg in late 2010.
0:00 / 0:35exact quote · 35.3s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I think Digg, Digg seems to be catering to the wrong crowd. Either they're, ah, acquiescing to investor pressure or, you know, just trying to change their product too much. Maybe they're trying to compete with Twitter too hard. But what they're not focusing on is what they had. What made them valuable was their community and the users who were powering that site, and they seem to have seem to be neglecting them, and the users are upset about that, and that's why they're, you know, behaving so unruly, or leaving, or, you know, it's left dig in kind of a sorry state for the past few months.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Steve Huffman
Huffman: Site speed was Reddit's only reliable traffic driver
“The only consistent thing we could do to drive traffic was make Reddit faster. Because sometimes we'd add a lot of features and traffic would go down. Sometimes we'd stagnate for a month or two and traffic would go up. And we're always just like, who knows, le…”
Huffman: Reddit might not have survived the 2008 recession independently
“Yeah, I, you know, I wish I still owned Reddit now, and had owned it for the last four or five years, but it would have, for everything to have gone right, for us to have the stomach to survive that economy, I mean, who knows, like, Kanye Nast's umbrella helpe…”
Huffman: Reddit is crushing Digg and is nearly twice its size
“Well, Reddit is crushing Dig now. I think they're almost twice as large as Dig... In traffic... And uniques per month and page views per month. Or is my understanding, you know, I haven't, I don't have direct access to Reddit numbers anymore, but from what the…”
Huffman: A 10% speed increase boosted Reddit page views by 10%
“If we made the site go faster by 10%, page use would go up by 10%.”
Huffman: Long headlines and minimal censorship drove community bonding
“Allowing users to have really long headlines, for example, was one thing that we did that, that other sites didn't, or, you know, not censoring swear words, or, you know, not censoring anything to the extent that we could get away with it, allows the community…”
Huffman: Reddit allowed all non-spam content without tailoring the platform
“To a large extent, it's anything goes. As long as it's not spam, most content will survive. And so that was one of the big philosophical differences between Reddit and Hacker News is, is we didn't want to remove content or we didn't want to tailor the site to …”